Day 16: Friday 28th August

After breakfast I dump the grey water where we are standing – it soon soaks in -and then take the spade and the cassette and bury the brown stuff about thirty metres away, in the tall weeds that have taken over the fields behind. We get ready to go and then double doors in the derelict building open up and a woman and a vehicle come towards us! Astonishingly the site is still in use and we are parked on the ramp that leads up to the village weighbridge! The slope was useful! It only takes a minute and we are out of everyone’s way, with smiles and thumbs up, and back towards Novgorod to inspect the kremlin. On the way through the village we stop to take photos of a couple of traditional houses and some passing locals stop their car to ask if everything is OK and do we need any help? We smile and thank them for their concern.

On the main road we stop to inspect the tank on a plinth, with memorial to those who fell defending Novgorod against the Nazis.

I park first of all outside the town hall but soon realise that won’t do. Just up the road is the proper car park for the kremlin, the entrance of which stumps us completely – until the attendant turns up and explains how we get in and that we will be charged as we leave.

It is still damp and grey with light showers from time to time so we wrap up for the walk around. The grounds are being given a major overhaul with cobbled paths being relaid all over. The church bells are ringing and a trickle of worshippers are straggling through the roadworks to get to the morning service. We study the elaborate statue assembly in the grounds, Catherine again, along with Potemkin and all her other ministers. Then wander over to the church and curiosity takes us inside. It is crowded and the service is in full flow. There’s a heavenly choir hidden away somewhere, or a recording of same, and several queues of people waiting to confess(?) to a priest, of which there are three at the front, plus a chap actually reading out the lesson. The air is heavy with incense and there is much bowing and crossing going on as people follow the service. In corners people are animated in saying their own individual prayers.

A young priest at the front is having a long conversation with a girl of 12 or 13. He is bending slightly forward and she is listening carefully and occasionally nodding in agreement. At the end of this, after five or ten minutes, he places an embroidered ‘tea towel’ on her bowed head, rests his hand on it and says a further prayer. She skips off and the next steps forward.

There is a counter selling religious bric a brac and icons. The smallest are around £5 and the largest (8” x 10”) for £70.

All in all we have seen a display of devoutness which certainly puts that of English Christians into the shade. As atheists we puzzle over these practices, of course.

We potter around the area a little longer after coming out of the church – it’s clearly a big resort with the wide river, boats and a sandy beach. As we head back to the car park we each buy a matryushka doll for our two granddaughters. Then I have a quick look in the tourist information office at the car park – and its very Russian female manager – heavy make-up, breathtaking cleavage, plenty of thigh and fishnet tights – had to leave quickly before my ticker gave out (HP)!

Novgorod is described in the Lonely Planet guide as a gem of a city, and it’s certainly doing its best to welcome tourists including us English-speaking ones. On our way in we had parked outside a bookshop which had a window display devoted to learning English ‘the fun way’. The kremlin has been totally reconstructed since the World War II bombings and now the detail is being seen to, even down to the renewal of worn cobblestones. The tourist office advertises itself as having English-speakers able to give advice and arrange English-language tours – tourist offices just don’t seem to exist elsewhere in Russia, let alone English-speaking ones. The roads into and out of Novgorod are superb. As we leave after our visit we see women employed to sweep stones off the road bridge marking our exit from the city. ‘Witches’ brooms of twigs are standard issue for road-sweepers in Russia.

Beyond the city boundary the alternating stretches of good and bad road are frustrating to drive, and we have steady rain for the first four hours making overtaking trucks doubly dodgy. The surface includes ruts, bumps, cracks, potholes and bad bridge joins. But after the rain comes sunshine again and the road soon dries out – a chance to make up time. We achieve 400km at an average 80-110 kph. Stopping to buy some apples at the side of the road proves impossible. Apart from the language problems it seems that they all want to sell them by the bucket-load, at R250 (£5) a time. The mysterious yellow mushrooms are even more costly at R300 for a shoebox-full. No matter what signage I use nobody can get my question, ‘how do you cook them?’

We pass yet another wedding party having photos done by a T34 tank memorial. Both white weddings and the photos by statues and memorials are daily activities here. We assume it must be out of respect for those who gave their lives so that Russia (not necessarily the USSR) could survive without submission. The voters of Leningrad may have opted to restore the city’s name to Tsarist times but Lenin and the Party live on in the thousands of statues, emblems and war memorials. Stalin, though, is almost totally absent. Perhaps all demolished after the twentieth congress of the CPSU in 1956? Occasionally there is a broken stump of a statue without a clue as to who it was.

Passed a motorway services area – Russian style – today! At least 50 stalls/kiosks strung along the side of the road serving tchai from samovars on the boil. Quite a sight to see all the wisps of steam rising into the cool air with dozens of trucks stopped alongside – must have been 2km long.

With all the modernisation there’s still a huge amount of tradition in this country – the samovars, wedding parties, war memorials, churches, peasants in their thousands selling stuff at the roadside.

As in the Baltic States there is a huge amount of road building going on but here presumably financed by oil revenues not the EU.

Almost every settlement along the way has the same pattern – ribbon development strung out one house deep along the road only a few metres back from a carriageway carrying thousands of HGVs every day. The houses are ancient wooden clapboard structures often with a fancy design and carved detailing. Some have collapsed and are abandoned, others appear derelict and are still occupied. A few are really well maintained and painted in bright primary colours sometimes with climbers around the door. Later we realise these must be the renowned dachas, though for the middle classes now rather than the country retreats of the nomenklatura.

When it’s time to pitch up for the night we pull off on to a side road and seek a quiet spot. it’s not far, and couldn’t be much quieter – right next to a village cemetery! We’re able to squeeze up a rarely used side track in long grass with a thick hedgerow between us and the road – almost out of sight. There’s no church and we’re able to mooch about the cemetery for a while without upsetting anybody. Fascinating grave culture – each one in its own little fenced enclosure with plastic flowers, pictures of the deceased and an orthodox cross.